The leadership case for moving deliberately

IN boardrooms and startup accelerators around the world, a counterintuitive truth is emerging: the leaders who move fastest are often the ones who deliberately slow down.

- NATALIE NIXΟΝ

Taking quiet time between high-stakes meetings to reset your emotional baseline is an easy way of practising emotional recovery.

(Freepik)

While our Western culture glorifies the perpetual sprint, elite performers are discovering what Navy SEALs have known for decades - "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast".Our modern productivity obsession is rooted in what the ancient Greeks called chromos linear, measurable time that ticks relentlessly forward on our calendars and clocks. This is the time of deadlines, sprint cycles and quarterly revenue reports. It's quantitative, urgent and unforgiving.

But the Greeks also recognised another dimension of time entirely: kairos - the right time, the opportune moment; time that’s qualitative rather than quantitative. Kairos is the difference between sending an email at 2am because you can, and sending it when your recipient is most likely to engage meaningfully with your message. It's the difference between filling your calendar with back-to-back meetings versus creating space for the kind of strategic thinking that actually moves things forward.

The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders I’ve worked with have learned to dance between both types of time, but they've discovered that honouring kairos often requires the courage to slow down in a chronos-obsessed world.

C-suite philosophy